Friday, June 19, 2015

English and Math Update

Where we are these days.

English

We've gone back to using our English Rod and Staff Textbooks.
Chloe on book 5, Phebe on book 4, and Hannah on book 3.


I think I've finally come to the line where we're going to start leaving all those cute little worksheets behind for some boring middle school work load.  I imagine I'll still pop some in from time to time, but yeah, I think we need to just get serious about sticking to one main curriculum and make serious gains in it rather than all this switching too and fro at whim like we've been doing.


I still have Writing with Skill for Chloe on the menu as well.  It's getting more challenging now.

And we also have those Climbing to Good English series too, which I think are great.  So yes, while I'll be serving up less in the worksheet department, we've still got several choices on the menu for English but my goal is to widdle them down as we go along.

* * * * *

Math

Chloe is using Saxon 6/5.
Phebe and Hannah both on 5/4.


I've stopped pulling apart our soft cover 5/4 now that I've got other copies and the girls aren't all working out of the same book.

My latest covers for their workbook.  Super cute, I think!

I've dropped the coil binding to try out how the workbook goes with just being stapled.  They're pretty big staples - holding 40 pages/lessons worth.  It just made putting the books together so much quicker than the binding, which can take a good while to do.  I just did't want that work load anymore since I have to make up these books pretty regularly.


How it's set up on the inside.
They start their lesson like this,


turn the page over and finish up on the left hand side.  Next day, repeat the process { and hopefully the next lesson }.  These days my cut off is 80%.  If a lesson comes in less than that they have to do a pink slip, and do the lesson over.


Here's an example.  This particular lesson didn't quite make the cut and so, yep, a pink slip { which you can see slipped in there under the lesson itself }.  To complete the pink slip one simply has a parent { usually me } or the CD walk them through all their mistakes in the lesson.  After that they go off to attempt the lesson all over again, only to be scored again.  ha ha ha.  Yep, every single lesson is scored.  This has it's advantages.  Since I know where they are at any given moment we don't need to do the tests.  I am also very particular about keeping those scores written down too.


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To infinity and beyond.


1 comment:

  1. I love seeing how other people use curricula, especially as we use Saxon and Rod & Staff English as well. Can't wait to see how the year continues to work for you. :-)

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